Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter forthe Debian community. Debian will be [1]present at the [2]Wizards ofOS conference next weekend in Berlin, Germany. André Luiz RodriguesFerreira [3]wondered if there will be special Debian [4]themesavailable for the desktop environments in [5]etch. Adrian von Bidder[6]discovered a 16 core MIPS [7]server with Debian pre-installed.

Secure APT Key Management. Andreas Barth [8]summarised the[9]discussion about key management for APT from July. The generalidea is to have an offline key for signing stable releases per releaseand a yearly rotating key for unstable. Stable release keys will berevoked by stable+2, so that updates between stable releases stillwork with the old key.

Alioth Incident Report. Raphaël Hertzog [10]reported Alioth was abusedas IRC proxy. Upon investigation the Alioth team discovered that manyprojects are running custom-installed web applications and asked theproject administrators to review the installed software. Raphaël addedthat a service like [11]Alioth is of great use for everybody, but itsopenness is also its weakness.

CD/DVD Creation Report. Steve McIntyre [12]reported about plans tomove the CD building and distribution servers to one site in order tominimise transfer delays. Other ideas include a special networkinstallation CD that boots on the top three architectures and anautomatic CD checker and the integration of Carlos Parra Camargo'swork as part of Google's Summer of Code.

Constitutional Amendment on Asset Handling. Manoj Srivastava[13]called for votes on a [14]general resolution to address theprocedures related to handling assets for the Debian project. Votesmust be received by 23:59:59 UTC on Saturday, 23rd September, 2006.This resolution reflects the fact that not only [15]Software in thePublic Interest, Inc. is handling assets for the Debian project.

Using the BTS for License Issues. Anthony Towns [16]suggestedintroducing a special licensing tag for reports in the [17]bugtracking system (BTS) that claim a package is not suitable fordistribution due to licensing problems. Don Armstrong [18]stated thatit's generally a good idea to start with usertags. This could point tothe [19]debian-legal mailing list.

Status of the Internet Superserver. Roger Leigh [20]investigated theinetd situation in [21]etch etch. Four of them support the IPv6protocol but some of them can't be considered as a drop-in replacementfor the standard BSD Internet superserver. He added that users who areupgrading from [22]woody or [23]sarge to [24]etch will not be switchedto openbsd-inetd, whereas new installs will use it by default.

First Colombian Mini DebConf. Alejandro Ríos Peña [25]reported aboutthe first Colombian [26]Mini DebConf on August 19th and 20th. 14Debian enthusiasts from all over the country participated in the eventand held a keysigning party. The Colombian Debian community is juststarting to get into the work and held a workshop on general Debiantasks and package maintenance.

Stable Release Update. Martin Zobel-Helas [27]summarised a stablerelease manager meeting and concluded that the next stable update isscheduled for mid of October. New kernel packages are said to be inpreparation, some packages were forgotten to be removed during thelast update, still some files weren't uploaded from the securityserver. Anthony Towns has agreed to update the archive software toallow updates of oldstable as well.

Firefox and Seamonkey. Mike Hommey [28]called for testers of the newFirefox 2.0b2 in experimental. In other news, work has started onSeamonkey. The developer team hopes to be able to provide a fullfeatured package for etch so that people using Mozilla on sarge willget a correct upgrade path. He has also uploaded a new [29]xulrunnerrelease that allows administrators to handle the certificatesdatabases for Mozilla products.

Orphaned Packages. 2 packages were orphaned this week and require anew maintainer. This makes a total of 316 orphaned packages. Manythanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the FreeSoftware community. Please see the [56]WNPP pages for the full list,and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if youplan to take over a package. To find out which orphaned packages areinstalled on your system the wnpp-alert program from devscripts may behelpful.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian communityand report about what is going on. Please see the [73]contributingpage to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving yourmail at [74]dwn@debian.org.